55 Beautiful Collage Style Designs by Marty Noble printed on one side of cream page

Marty Noble is one of the first two artists to release coloring books on Dover’s new Escapes line. The books are still standard size but are presented horizontally with each of the designs being horizontal as well.

Ms. Noble is one of my favorite designers and this book has 55 wonderful designs in it. Some of the designs are reminiscent of those in her older books (steampunk, art nouveau, winter, etc.) but the designs are all original in their presentation. They are quite detailed and are a fun challenge for me to color. The designs run a large range of subjects and have the beautiful artwork I have come to expect from Ms. Noble.

The book does not have colored samples in it (unlike Dover’s Creative Haven line.) It does have some line art on the inside of both the front and back cover. The paper is cream color and is similar in feel to that of the Creative Haven line.

The pages are perforated but I found them a tad more difficult to remove without tearing the pages. I think it may have to do with the width of the book being longer. After slightly tearing a couple of pages as I tried to remove them, I put a chipboard under the page and scored over the perforations with a box cutter (though a knife or scissor would have worked as well.) Once I did that, I could easily remove the page from the book without tearing it.

For my first project which is a wine collage, I used Marco Raffine coloring pencils which I was testing as well. For my second project which features fuchsias, I used my Prismacolor Premier Soft Core pencils along with a skin tone marker. I also tested a number of other coloring pencils, markers, and pens as well.

Here is an overview of what I found in this coloring book:

55 Collage style designs by Marty Noble
Printed on one side of cream color paper
Paper is perforated and has a slight roughness to to the touch
Book is presented horizontally
Designs stop before the perforations
Designs have a framing line around the outer edge for a natural and more finished stopping point
Glue Bound
Alcohol and water based markers bleed through the page (though water based spotted more than a complete bleed through)
Gel pens and India ink pens left shadows of color on the back of the page
Coloring pencils worked well with this paper. I found that wax-based pencils blended with a deeper color but oil-based pencils provided a deeper coverage with less effort. Hard lead pencils left dents on the back of the page.

While I removed my pages from the book to color, if you plan on coloring the pages while they are still in the book, you should consider using a blotter page behind your working page. That will help stop ink and dents from marring the page below.